Ashkenazi food goes upscale as a new generation of Jewish chefs modernize their bubbes’ recipes | Canada Voices

At Linny’s, an elegant steakhouse on Toronto’s trendy Ossington strip, a group of servers in white aprons and bow ties brings out an array of food with deep roots in Jewish Ashkenazi culture. These are the same Central and Eastern European dishes that appear on the menus of classic Jewish delis and that bubbes (Yiddish for grandmothers) serve at family meals, but they’ve undergone a transformation.

The challah ($15) – the bread traditionally served at the weekly Shabbat meal – is an individual round braided loaf, served with house-made farmer’s cheese and wonderfully tart jam made from local strawberries. The mouth-watering pastrami ($49), brined for up to six days, smoked and brushed with tallow butter, isn’t served in a classic deli sandwich, but directly on the plate, like Linny’s $200 porterhouse steak.

The kasha and bows ($25), an Ashkenazi dish consisting of buckwheat and schmaltz (rendered chicken or goose fat), is elevated with handmade egg noodles and a sauce with seasonal vegetables. The schnitzel ($32), normally a soothing comfort food, moves into edgier territory by using beef tripe with chicken gravy.

David Schwartz, who is behind Linny’s, is one of a small group Jewish chefs in Toronto and New York moving into upscale Ashkenazi dining, using refined techniques to inject new life into classics. While traditional Jewish spots such as Montreal’s famed Schwartz’s Deli and Toronto’s United Bakers Dairy Restaurant have been casual, affordable places, these new restaurants typically require reservations and are better suited to cocktails with friends or date nights than family-style dining.

Schwartz, who also created Sunnys Chinese and Mimi Chinese, had long wanted to open a Jewish deli, but after seeing many of those institutions fail, he figured that having a higher price point would make it more feasible to use the laborious handcrafted processes that are hard to recoup in the price of a sandwich. While some of his diners are new to Ashkenazi food, others grew up with it.

“Some people can’t let go of the context of how they originally interacted with some of these dishes, and then for others, like myself and my generation, it makes it exciting again,” says Schwartz, who opened Linny’s, named in honour of his late mother, last September. “A lot of the stuff on the menu were things I did not enjoy eating growing up. Kasha and bows – I hated it. So I thought, how do we make a version of kasha and bows that’s true to its origin point, but it’s exciting and delicious for people like myself?”

In recent decades, there has been more excitement about Jewish Mediterranean food – Sephardic and Israeli – than Ashkenazi dishes, which were seen as bland, overcooked and heavy in starch and fat. However, the 2016 cookbook The Gefilte Manifesto, by Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz of Brooklyn, N.Y., prompted a broader rethinking of Ashkenazi food by leaning into seasonal, vegetable-forward dishes that had been overshadowed after Jews migrated to North America.

Other North American restaurants updating Ashkenazi dishes include the upscale Brooklyn spots Gertrude’s and Agi’s Counter and the mid-range Montreal eateries Arthurs Nosh Bar and Hof Kelsten.

“It’s part of this trend of young Jews drawing on their heritage, using great ingredients and making their food in very intentional and thoughtful ways,” says Kat Romanow, a Montreal Jewish food historian and recipe developer. “It’s amazing to see Jewish food moving forward and another generation putting their own spin on it. It’s not just brisket and potatoes and schmaltz.”

Shauna Godfrey opened her Toronto restaurant Maven on Harbord, a traditionally Jewish street, in November. Maven (Yiddish for “expert”) was the nickname of her bubbe Rose, who taught her cooking techniques.

“I felt like there was pretty good representation in the city of deli, bagel places, Middle Eastern food. My grandmother was from Poland and I felt like this kind of food wasn’t really represented in restaurants,” says Godfrey, who previously cooked Asian cuisine at Momofuku. “I try to keep our food rooted in something that feels like a traditional dish or something in the world of Ashkenazi cooking, but use techniques and ingredients and flavours that are slightly different.”

Closer to the classics than Linny’s, Maven serves its crowd-pleasing chicken schnitzel with lacto-fermented plum sauce, which includes shallots, white soy sauce and brown butter. The duck confit cholent, made with romano beans, schmaltzy onion and dill, takes three days to prepare and draws from French cassoulet as well as the traditional Shabbat stew.

Other Jewish chefs, such as Zach Kolomeir, are drawing on their heritage in unexpected ways. His newly opened Toronto Italian eatery, N.L. Ginzburg, serves a traditional chopped liver dish seasoned like an Italian antipasti. The restaurant’s non-kosher mixed grill, a heaping plate of pork, certainly doesn’t conform with Jewish religious law, but Kolomeir says it draws inspiration from older Jewish communities that maximized limited resources.

While the chefs are keen to avoid talking about politics and the Middle East – understandable given the targeting of Jewish restaurants around the world in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack and subsequent Israel-Hamas war – they are proud to draw on their heritage and find new audiences for Ashkenazi food. Connecting with their own family stories, and harkening back to an earlier era, prior to the founding of Israel, can be safer ground.

“This is a way of staying Jewish, but not treading into some awkward questions,” says Nora Rubel, a professor in Jewish studies at the University of Rochester. “It’s an easier sell to say, ‘This is the Jewish food that our grandmothers made.’”

Maven, in particular, has become a gathering point for various groups from Toronto’s diverse Jewish community, which have reacted positively to Godfrey’s reinventions. And those who prefer the more casual Jewish haunts haven’t been completely ignored by this new wave of chefs. If the white-tablecloth atmosphere of Linny’s isn’t your thing, you can still enjoy Schwartz’s meticulous cooking techniques at a more affordable price by grabbing the satisfying $16 pastrami sandwich at Linny’s Luncheonette, his new takeout spinoff.